viii, 420 pages : 25 cm

This book is the history of an imaginary people - the Red Jews - in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship

English, German, and Latin

Includes bibliographical references (pages 391-409) and indexes

1. Inventio rerum et locorum: Finding a Forgotten History -- 2. Apocalypticism and Messianism: Christian and Jewish Perspectives on the End in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages -- 3. Antisemitism and Apocalypticism in the Middle Ages -- 4. The Red Jews in their 'Native Habitat' -- 5. The Medieval Antichrist and his Jewish Henchmen -- 6. A Medieval Legend in the Sixteenth Century: Pious and Political Permutations -- 7. Approaches to the End -- App. A: The Red Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Sources -- App. B: The 'Unclean Nations', Gog and Magog, and the Ten Tribes -- App. C: Antichrist and the Jews at the End of Time -- App. D: Illustrations

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